Joe Posnanski squares up to 'Paterno,' and weighs the man who is no longer Joe Pa

View full sizeJohn Beale, Associated Press fileOn July 22, a blanket cloaks the 900-pound, 7-foot bronze statue of Joe Paterno as authorities remove a key piece of football iconography from the Pennsylvania State University campus.

Last November, not long before he died, legendary football coach Joe Paterno gathered his wife, Sue, and their five grown children around the family's kitchen table. Born in 1926, an old man despite his seeming vigor on the football field of Pennsylvania State University, Paterno spoke about his naivete.

On the table rested a court document setting out criminal charges against Jerry Sandusky, a veteran assistant Penn State football coach. Sandusky would be convicted of sexually assaulting boys; Paterno said he had no clue. The Paterno children, all adults, insisted that their father read the document so he would know what he was up against.

"The words jumped up and stung him," writes biographer Joe Posnanski. "Penetration. Erection. Genitals. Oral. What did those words have to do with him? His life? Even as a boy, when he played quarterback on his high school football team back in Brooklyn, he would lecture his teammates in his high-pitched squeal when one of them unleashed a swear word. 'Aw gee, come on, guys, let's keep it clean!' They thought him a prude even then."

Although highly educated, an intense lover of opera and ancient Greek classics, Paterno kept himself intentionally ignorant of the tawdry. "The old man stared at the papers in front of him and asked his children questions about sex that embarrassed everyone," Posnanski reports.

Near the end of "Paterno," Posnanski is alone with his subject, who had been fired a couple of weeks earlier. He asks the veteran sports journalist, "So, what do you think of all this?"

Posnanski writes: "I told [Paterno] that I thought he should have done more when he was told [in 2001] about Jerry Sandusky showering with a boy. I had heard what he said about not understanding the severity, not knowing much about child molestation, not having Sandusky as an employee [by then]. But, I said, 'You are Joe Paterno. Right or wrong, people expect more from you.' He nodded."

Between those end-table passages, Posnanski crafts a fascinating biography. Paterno was raised in Depression-era Brooklyn, N.Y., by laid-back law clerk Angelo and pushy, perfectionist Florence, a telephone operator. Her influence was profound.

Paterno became known as an eligible but work-obsessed bachelor around State College, living in the basement of another family's home. At 32, he met Sue Pohland, a teenage Penn State freshman. They married soon after her graduation.

A chunk of the biography chronicles the rise of Penn State as a football powerhouse, with detailed accounts of games won, and occasionally lost. But the book's most compelling sections explain something Paterno called a Grand Experiment.

Unlike most of his counterparts, Paterno insisted on recruiting students who excelled in the classroom as well as on the field. He kept his promises to them and their parents -- pressuring players to enroll in challenging courses, giving them time to study, encouraging them to plan careers that would flourish after football glories faded.

Beyond his molding of young men, Paterno led a rich, interesting interior life that Posnanski captures here. The reporter's access was exceptional -- very few biographers receive such cooperation from initially reluctant subjects and then escape editorial interference from them later. Simon & Schuster advanced Posnanski a reported $750,000. He used it, in part, to move to State College and dig in.

"Paterno" is a testament to Posnanski's access, empathy and perceptiveness about a man embraced for decades as a paragon of virtue, then pushed away as a disgrace. Even as the new Penn State administrators ordered a 7-foot-tall statue of Paterno removed from campus last month, Posnanski has constructed a lasting, more nuanced portrait.

In it, he concludes that the coach's pride in a life well lived was largely justified.

Steve Weinberg, an investigative reporter since 1969, became interested in Penn State 17 years ago when his high school friend, Graham Spanier, became president. Spanier resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.

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